Category

Published on

28 Jul 2010

Abstract

The NEEShub IT development team is working closely with UIUC to identify ways to bring the NEES community of researchers into NEEShub by offering them useful functionality that will ensure the population and continued use of NEEShub.

A session for joint presentations and discussion was held at Newmark Lab, with UIUC researchers and developers Dan Kuchma, Michael Bletzinger and Greg Pluta, and NEEShub reseachers and developers George Howlett and Ann Christine Catlin.

The following topics were discussed:

EOT videos and support environment

The UIUC EOT videos, images, documents and "activities" are based on an experiment, and the "packaging" of the content can be considered a model for this kind of educational presentation at NEEShub. Hub development effort is needed to fully support their ideas for presentation of the EOT videos as modules and also to support the related "activities".

GOAL: A model for presenting educational content.

Organizing and presenting experiment information for collaboration
Our first "case study" is the Complex Wall project. This presentation of experiment information will use NEEShub resources, group wiki/attachments, and group dropbox. The idea is to support the presentation and use of documents, specimens, videos, images, and data (including analysis using inDEED) in a collaborative group-shared way. We have started working with Laura and Dan; documents & data are already being stored in private group resources at the hub. We need to understand the best way to do this as a roadmap for future "case studies".

GOAL: An organizational model for bringing together experiment information for daily use by a collaborative group.

Other specific projects associated with Michael's work

see bullet item above

ExViz: generalize and incorporate as hub tool

This would be a joint effort to bring the capabilities of this plotting & analysis program into the hub. An initial effort to generalize the input and underlying data structures needs to be made, and we discussed the possibility of incorporating the functionality into inDEED (or ExViz could exist as a separate tool).

GOAL: Determine the best way to make the analysis capabilities of this program available to NEES researchers.

Tools and scripts for experiment data pre-processing

Michael has a number of tools/scripts that can be contributed to NEEShub for processing of experiment data. The idea is that these tools/scripts would operate on data in the group dropbox.

GOAL: Work with NEES site researchers to see what scripts, codes and other experiment data processing tools can easily be made available at the hub.

Project websites at NEEShub

Many researchers have asked about support for building their project website at NEEShub. We are looking at the use of resources and other supporting hub capabilities (e.g., member profiles, groups) but they would like some degree of flexility in presentation. So this might require some NEEShub development effort. We have a specific example and request from Dan Abrams to use for discussion.

GOAL: Build a facility to create project websites that makes use of existing hub capabilities such as resources.

Opensees

There are number of sites (UIUC, U of Texas) where grad students use OpenSees for a specific kind of experiment. Perhaps we can analyze these specific cases and have the students help us build tools for these cases at the hub.

GOAL: Initial collection of opensees tools with GUI and plotting.

Hybrid simulation

We need more information and discussion about this topic to understand how NEEShub can support it.

Plotting with inDEED

Throughout all the discussions, we identified new ideas for plotting experiment data. Discussions regarding these will continue with George.

SOM administrative functions via the hub

We need to work with Greg to understand what it would take to support this.